Has my work as a student journalist made a difference to anybody? Probably not.

Why not? Too many journalism schools still treat a diploma as if it is the ticket to the “real world.” So much of the work that we, student journalists, produce exists to fill out a resume rather than inform communities. Most professors agree that up-to-date hands-on experience is best, but most schools haven’t blended that experience into their curriculum.

Journalism can lead us astray, argues Harvard professor Tom Patterson in his book, “Informing the News.” He cites a University of Maryland study on what Americans knew about 11 issues, from health care reform to climate change. For some news consumers, “higher levels of exposure increased misinformation.” On eight of the 11 issues in the study, more than 40 percent of the consumers were misinformed. On six issues, regular news consumers knew only what everyone else knew. On health care, news consumers knew less than what others knew.

Patterson makes a strong case that modern journalism often fails to communicate complexity. The book, an offshoot of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education, examines journalism that fails to provide meaningful context, sometimes by giving equal weight to fact and opinion, other times by substituting infotainment for real news, still other times by allowing anecdote to trump trend.